Curt Cignetti has a sentence he says so often his assistants can finish it for him. Production over potential. ESPN's Adam Rittenberg called it the mission statement of Indiana's whole evaluation process in a January piece written while the Hoosiers were sitting at No. 1, two wins from the title they ended up winning. Pat Kuntz, who coaches Indiana's defensive tackles, told ESPN that Cignetti flashes a hand signal for "duck feet" when he spots it on film, and the staff goes back and rechecks. In Rittenberg's telling, a defect like that gets a prospect scratched off the list. Buddha Williams, the defensive ends coach, said the first thing Cignetti asks about any prospect is the stats. Junior year, senior year, and if he only played eight games, why.
You can go back further. On the day Indiana introduced him in December 2023, Cignetti told the room, per the Indianapolis Star, "I have never ever looked at a star," and then asked whether anybody really thought the guy putting stars on kids knew more than coaches who watched hours of tape. He wasn't being cute. He was describing a method that was about to turn a program that had never won a national title into an unbeaten champion.
Okay, so he never said "stars are a bet, yards are a receipt." Not in those words. But you get the point.
We bring this up because it's the cleanest way to explain what SPIN's production rankings are, and what they aren't.
What We're Answering
Recruiting rankings answer one question: what might this kid become? It's a fair question, and the best people who answer it for a living are very good at it. Brandon Huffman, who joined Rivals as a national recruiting analyst this spring after nine years at 247Sports, has been evaluating recruits for more than twenty years and sits on the selection committees for the Polynesian Bowl and the Navy All-American Bowl. He has forgotten more football than most of us will learn, and when he projects a 16-year-old three years out, you should listen. That's not the job we're doing. Frame, long speed, how a kid fills out in a college weight room, that's projection, and a projection is a bet.
Nobody was answering the other question the way it deserves. Stat leaderboards exist, and they tell you who piled up yards. They don't tell you who he piled them up against, and they don't put a kid from a state's smallest classification and a kid from its toughest on the same page. What did he actually do, and who did he do it against?
That's the whole product. A SPIN production rating is a player's season, game by game, adjusted for the opponent he played each one against, and put on one national scale so a number in Sacramento means the same thing as a number in Salt Lake. No offer list, no star, no college destination goes into it. If it didn't happen with the clock running, it doesn't count.
Cignetti, talking to ESPN about his early years as a Pitt assistant, put it this way: "We probably took too many chances on potential." Then the part that matters: "And a lot of them didn't pan out." That's the gap we're trying to fill at the high school level. The potential side is well staffed, and staffed by people like Huffman. The competition-adjusted production side had nobody.
What It Measures
Start with the thing that makes high school football impossible to read off a raw stat sheet. The opponents are not close to the same.
In late September, one Utah 6A region had a program rated inside the top 100 of roughly 14,000 eleven-man teams in the country and a program rated past 4,000th. Same region. They play each other in October. A defensive back's four interceptions against the first team and four against the second are not the same four interceptions, and everyone who has stood on a sideline knows it. Stretch that across six classifications and the opponents a Utah player might face run almost the entire national spectrum.
So every game gets weighed for who it was against before it counts. Production against an elite opponent is worth more. Production against a badly overmatched one is worth less. Where it was played matters as well: a road game is weighed as a slightly tougher game than the same opponent at home, because it is. Games that were decided before kickoff get a measured discount, because garbage time is not the same football. Showing up counts too: a player who produced for eleven games has produced more than one who did it for eight, and the rating credits the games he played on top of what he did per game.
Then it all goes onto one scale. A SPIN production rating runs 25 to 99, calibrated position by position against the national field, so a 90 at linebacker is meant to be as rare a season as a 90 at receiver. The tiers read the way you'd read a grade:
Starter, under 70. A kid who played and produced like a varsity regular.
Good Starter, 70 to 74. Better than most of the players lined up across from him.
Standout Starter, 75 to 79. The guy his own coaches build around.
All-Region, 80 to 84. One of the best in his region at the position.
All-State, 85 to 89. A season that belongs on an all-state ballot in his classification.
Elite, 90 to 94. Fewer than a hundred players across every position in a state the size of Utah in a full year.
Elite National, 95 to 98. A season that would stand out on a national board, never mind a state one.
Generational, 99. Almost nobody. We don't expect to hand many out, and we'd rather hand out none than cheapen it.
The tiers are context. The number is the rank. A 91 and a 90 produced similar seasons, and on a deep board that single point can be the difference between third and ninth. That's not a flaw. That's what a ranking is for. If two players are a point apart, the one on top earned the point, and we'll show you the stat lines and the schedules that put him there.
That's what lets a quarterback from a smaller classification and one from the state's toughest sit on the same board without anybody pretending they played the same schedule. We don't think a back in the smallest classification and a back in the toughest are playing the same game. We think we can measure the difference, and once you can measure it you can rank them together.
One more thing about the scale. Before we put a live season on it we ran all of 2025, start to finish, playoffs included. Two reasons. A rating system should be built on a complete year before it's asked to judge a partial one. And you should be able to see what a full season looks like next to the one still being played. The 2025 boards, our first Proofs, follow in the coming days. The 2026 boards move every week as box scores post, and a kid at 78 in Week 8 may be at 84 or 71 by December. Read them that way.
How Deep the Boards Go
Every player in the state with a stat line in at least five games carries a POP, from the best quarterback in the state's toughest classification down to a sophomore getting his first carries in its smallest. For Utah this season that's more than 1,500 players. The boards print the top of that list: a Top 25 at each position statewide, and a Top 10 for each classification, using the state's own classification system. In Utah that's 6A through 1A as the UHSAA draws them. In California, which doesn't classify statewide the way Utah does, the Top 10s run by CIF section. We check every classification and section against the governing body before a board publishes, because alignments change and a kid listed in the wrong class is a wrong board. When a classification has too few rated players at a position to make a real list, those players stay on the statewide board instead.
Below the cut, the ratings exist and keep updating. This is version one. We're starting with the top of each list on purpose, so the boards earn trust before they go deeper, and we'll expand toward every rated player in the state as we go. When we do, we'll say so here.
We're starting 2026 with Utah and Northern California. Arizona, Southern California, Nevada, Colorado, Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest are next, and a national board comes after that.
What It Doesn't Measure
Plenty, and we'd rather tell you than have you find out.
It doesn't measure potential. A rating can't tell you how tall a kid is, how fast he ran in shorts, or what he'll look like at 21. That's Huffman's job and the job of people like him, and we're not trying to do it.
It doesn't measure process. A box score records things that went right. No stat crew at this level charts the missed tackle, the dropped pass, the throw that was a half-second late, or the corner nobody threw at because he was the corner nobody threw at. Decision-making and timing show up in the number only through what they produced. When SPIN grades those traits, it'll be from film, as a separate number, printed next to this one.
It doesn't rate offensive linemen. There's no box score for the position and no honest way to invent one. Return men and kickers aren't graded either.
It can't fix bad stats on its own. Garbage in, garbage out. Public statistics at this level are entered by coaches, volunteers and parents, and defensive numbers are the least consistent of all. If a stat crew hands a kid eleven tackles he didn't make, the rating will believe them until somebody shows us otherwise. SPIN uses the most official statistics available for each player, some public, some brought to us by programs and verified, some from official organizations, and every line on a published board goes through our checks before it counts. When a line could not be verified, we say so. If a number is wrong, send us what you have. If it checks out, we fix it and the fix carries into every board that number touches.
And it isn't finished. This is version one. The engine will change as we learn, and when it does, our methodology page will say so. We'd rather be caught improving than pretend we nailed it the first time.
How We Check Ourselves
A ranking built on vibes can't be wrong, which is exactly why it's worthless. A ranking built on production can be checked, so we check ours against things we didn't build. And we'll be clear about what we show: every board prints the stat line, the games and the schedule strength behind every rating, and our methodology page explains how the engine works in principle. The exact weights are ours and stay ours. You can check our inputs and argue with our order. You can't reverse-engineer the machine, and that's deliberate.
The main one is the all-state teams. In Utah, the Deseret News all-state teams work like this: each program nominates its own players with stats and comments for a ballot, the ballot is organized by position, and coaches vote. Our 2025 boards agree with those selections at about two of every three spots, judged within each classification.
Here's why we think the other three or four are worth having. All-state starts with a nomination, so a program that doesn't nominate a kid, or doesn't nominate anybody, leaves him off before a vote is cast. Coaches vote on what they saw across from them, which skews toward the players who hurt their team and toward the programs that won. Every classification gets about the same number of slots regardless of how deep the position is that year. And a stat sheet handed in with a ballot isn't adjusted for who it came against. We'd expect a good production rating to agree with a good coaches' vote most of the time and to disagree in exactly those places, and that's roughly where our misses sit. When they disagree, we're not saying the coaches got it wrong. We're saying there's a second answer. And we'll own the obvious: the stats our rating runs on are entered by many of the same coaches whose votes we're measuring against. We depend on their stat crews as much as the ballot does.
What It's For
The kid with 1,600 receiving yards against real defenses in a smaller classification deserves a number next to the kid with 900 in the state's toughest, and right now he doesn't have one. The recruiting services aren't built to find him. That's the gap we're trying to fill.
We'll be honest about the size of that job. Putting every player in Utah, NorCal, Arizona and beyond on one even playing field, across six classifications and schedules that run from the best programs in the country to programs that would struggle two counties over, is a huge challenge. We won't get all of it right in year one. But if these rankings help even one kid who wasn't getting recruited get a phone call, they've done their job.
The people who project for a living deserve a second question to ask, too. Cignetti's staff asks it first: what did he do, in how many games, and why not more? We'd like every college staff looking at a kid in our footprint to be able to pull that answer in ten seconds, with the schedule attached.
It has names, too. During the season it's POP, short for Production Over Potential, and we know whose three words those are. POP moves every week. When the season is over and every number has been checked one last time, POP becomes Proof, and Proof is the record. The idea under both belongs to anybody who ever got tired of watching the fast kid in shorts get the offer while the kid with the 1,600 yards got a handshake.
Stars are a bet. Yards are a receipt.
The first two 2026 boards are live now: Utah and Northern California. The full methodology, including how competition is weighed and how every line is checked, is here: How POP and Proof work.
